I checked out the full repository of an open source project I have been tinkering with in both SVN and Git (libgdx). The SVN was MUCH larger than the Git repository on my hard drive (i think 33% more, but I can't remember).

Another example is Django. A Subversion checkout (only trunk, no branches or tags) uses 186 MByte on hard drive, a Git clone uses 87 MByte. That's really astonishing when considering that the git clone contains 6 years of history and 10600 commits.

Please explain to me how exactly China selling their x trillion USD worth of reserves would devalue the Euro?

Their total foreign exchange reserves are $2.5 trillion, only a part of it is in USD (the major part, though). China already began buying massive amounts of Euro, under the premise of helping countries in peril of bankruptcy, like Greece and Ireland. With the current state of the Euro, it doesn't take much bad news anymore to sink it, completely.

And, of course, our globalized markets mean that when the US sneezes, Europe gets a cold. Rest assured that China is capable of sending the US economy directly into intensive care, and with it the Eurozone.

Actually, if they did something that devalued the USD, it would hurt them badly.

The Telegraph article I linked to named this course of action, rather appropriately, the nuclear option. China won't use this weapon lightly, but if the US would implement such a drastic embargo as proposed by drinkypoo, what other choice do they have?

Essentially, we're living in an economic cold war between China and the West (US, mostly). Both sides have the tools to annihilate the other's economy, but not without destroying or badly hurting its own.

Who cares? The economy doesn't depend on that shit. What's more interesting is what percentage of actually useful items are made in China (which is still ridiculously high) and what's even more interesting is how much of that stuff can't be made here, which is to say almost none of it. If we stopped buying Chinese stuff for whatever reason you'd see toaster and eggbeater factories pop back up overnight. Or, more likely, they'd pop back up in Mexico again.

If the US would take such drastic measures, China would probably answer by selling their $2.5 trillions in foreign exchange reserves, most of them US Dollars. That would devalue the USD and EUR to virtually zero, bringing about economic turmoil of unprecedented magnitude.

Let's face it: China got us by the balls, and they are ready to squeeze them.

With bit.ly, you can simply append a "+" to the URL and get an information page showing, between other information, which URL hides behind it, e.g. http://bit.ly/cTGasX+. I don't know if they have a setting to always display this info page, but I'm sure there are usersrcipts and bookmarklets out there that automatically append a "+" to every bit.ly link.

Please tell me you aren't someone who is going to condemn an entire industry because of one accident. No human enterprise ever attempted managed to get underway without mistakes.

If it's an industry where one mistake translates to environmental and economical damage on the scale we are witnessing at the gulf coast right now, then yes, condemning (and perhaps even abolishing) said industry may be the right thing to do.

That statement from Jobs is absolutely tactless. Not only did he ridicule the work of the KHTML devs ("a small open source project"), he didn't even feel like writing out its name. I really love what Apple's done with WebKit, but Jobs could at least acknowledge that, thanks to KHTML, they had a great foundation to build upon.

My HTC Desire plays most flash content (but not Shockwave), and I think the HTC Legend does, too. I have it disabled most of the time, though, most flash content on the web consists of annoying ads stealing my battery juice.

Formula1's obsession with security only really began with Ayrton Senna's tragic death. What the engineers have achieved since then is nothing else but breathtaking. Have a look at some crashes from the last decade on Youtube (e.g. Robert Kubica in 2007). In todays F1 cars, you can basically drive into a concrete wall at 120 mph and come out of the wreck with little more than a dizzy head. And that's what you call "not doing their job"?